


Specter

by Engineer104



Category: Voltron: Legendary Defender
Genre: Bittersweet Ending, Canon-Typical Violence, Character Turned Into a Ghost, Emotional Hurt/Comfort, F/M, Family Feels, Fluff, Future Fic, Grief/Mourning, Heavy Angst, Major Character Injury, Maybe - Freeform, Mutual Pining, Non-Canonical Character Death, Post-Canon, Red Paladin Lance (Voltron), Sort of anyway, Sort of? - Freeform, everything is just yikes, mind the warning
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2017-12-06
Updated: 2017-12-06
Packaged: 2019-02-11 07:44:03
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Major Character Death
Chapters: 1
Words: 18,325
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/12930699
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Engineer104/pseuds/Engineer104
Summary: Pidge struggles to move on.Lance insists on staying.





	Specter

**Author's Note:**

> *hums Florence + the Machine lyrics*
> 
> originally intended for Pidgance Month Day 3: Homesickness, then turned into a tragic fic of 18k words
> 
> PLEASE mind the major character death warning. like, the dead character is there, they're a character, they walk and talk and all...but they ARE dead, so if that's not your thing...don't say i didn't warn you
> 
> i would apologize, but...i almost cried writing this too so come suffer with me
> 
> also special thanks to [Trix](https://tiredgaykeith.tumblr.com/) for ~~suffering first~~ their initial feedback

**** Pidge’s ears ring with the sound of blaster fire and her teammates yelling indistinctly directly into her ear. Her whole body aches, particularly her chest and abdomen. She thinks she’s lying on the ground, but for how muffled all her senses seem she can just as easily be floating in zero gravity.

Pidge forces her arms to move, slowly, and she rests her hands on her helmet.

“Wait, Pidge, don’t do that!” a familiar voice finally says. “We’re not at the Castle yet, and--”

Wonder of wonders, Pidge obeys, and opens her eyes, blinking when she doesn’t immediately recognize her blurry surroundings as the Red Lion’s cockpit.

“W-where am I?” she asks, voice faint and shaky. Her throat is sore too, and she thinks she must’ve been screaming earlier, but she can’t quite remember…

“This is the Yellow Lion, Pidge,” a gentle voice says from nearby.

She turns her head to the side, smiling in relief when she finds Hunk in his seat. He glances towards her, away from the viewscreen just out of her line of sight, but she frowns when she sees how red his eyes are and registers how hoarse his voice was…

“What happened?” she says.

Hunk lands the Yellow Lion and comes to her right as she starts struggling to sit up. Something shifts around her stomach, and she groans, putting a hand to her abdomen at the sudden pain dancing along her nerves.

“Wait, don’t move, Pidge,” Hunk says, holding his hands over her. “I’ll carry you to the med bay. You need a healing pod.”

“I’m-I’m fine,” Pidge says. But when she remembers, her eyes spring wide open and she demands, “Hunk,  _ where’s Lance _ ?”

Hunk casts his eyes down, but his hand comes up to grip her own, fingers so tight it would hurt if her other pains weren’t so much  _ worse _ . “Oh, Pidge,” he says, voice tremulous.

“Tell me,” she says softly.

“He’s...with Keith, in the Red Lion.”

Pidge sags with relief, at least until she reads Hunk’s tone, how  _ avoidant  _ it is. “Get him to the healing pod first,” she says. “I can...I can wait.”

“No, you can’t,” Hunk says. “And Pidge, Lance is...his heart stopped.”

Pidge squeezes Hunk’s hand so tight he flinches, but she doesn’t apologize and instead hisses, “Then who the quiznak is flying the Red Lion?”

“Keith.”

Pidge covers her face with her arm, sagging into Hunk when he wraps his arms around her. She shakes her head against his shoulder, not willing to believe it, but she’s so out of it - so exhausted in mind, body, and soul - that she doesn’t fight Hunk when he picks her up and carries her out of the Yellow Lion.

“Please don’t put me in a healing pod,” she says.

Hunk sighs, but, to her surprise, he carries her to her bedroom instead. “You should at least have Coran check for internal damage,” he tells her.

“They’re probably just...a few bruised ribs,” Pidge tells him, pressing a hand to her chest. Absurdly, she adds, “And there’s nothing there for them to puncture anyway.”

“That...makes  _ no  _ sense, Pidge,” Hunk says sternly.

Pidge only clicks her tongue as he sets her on her bed. Before he can ask if she needs anything, she cuts him off, “I can change out of my own armor, but...thank you, Hunk.”

Hunk doesn’t smile, and she appreciates that he doesn’t bother trying. “Get some sleep, Pidge,” he says.

“But...Lance--”

“Nothing will change between now and when you wake up,” Hunk says, sounding just as weary and  _ devastated  _ as Pidge felt. “Do you want me to stay with you?”

She shakes her head; her thoughts are in turmoil, unable and unwilling to accept Hunk at his word at the moment, especially not without solid evidence - evidence beyond what she witnessed, as the memory trickles back into her mind in pieces. But she needs a moment to herself to collect them, and she’s too tired to walk anywhere on her own.

“You’re not alone, Pidge,” Hunk reassures her, but he leaves after a murmured ‘good night’.

Pidge tears off her armor as soon as he’s gone, dropping and throwing the individual pieces unceremoniously until she’s only in the tight black undersuit. That she peels from her sweat-damp skin, exposing it to the cool, stale draft that always persists inside the Castle.

She washes her face, brushes her teeth, and slips into her pajamas, almost losing herself in the mundanity of the routine, and by then she’s enough of her strength to step outside of her bedroom.

Pidge’s feet carry her to Lance’s room almost of their own accord. She raises her fist and knocks, but after waiting for a tic, she sighs and opens the door.

She grabs what she came for and retreats to the med bay.

* * *

Pidge sits on the floor of the medical bay, not quite leaning against an unoccupied healing pod, waiting for an injured body to take up residence there. Instead she slumps forward, face buried in her arms. Tears still soak into  _ his  _ jacket sleeves, even though by now she’s spent all her sobs.

Pidge’s chest aches, with grief, with heartbreak, with the exhaustion that follows crying, and with the bruised ribs she suffered on their mission. Despite Hunk’s suggestion that she go into the healing pod for them, Pidge continued to decline. She refused to welcome the oblivion of a medically induced coma, not when sleeping meant forgetting and waking meant remembering.

She doesn’t look up at the sound of quiet footsteps growing louder as they approach, and she doesn’t look up when their owner sits with a soft sigh beside her. But she looks up when a warm arm is slung around her shoulders, though she can barely see Matt’s face through the fog of her tears.

“I wasn’t in time,” she tells him, voice trembling on a fresh sob.

“It wasn’t your fault, Pidge,” he reassures her, though it sounds hollow.

“If I was just a little faster,” Pidge says, clenching her hands into fists, “or a little stronger, he wouldn’t be—”

“Pidge,” Matt interrupts her, a surprisingly  _ stern  _ frown on his face. He takes her by the shoulders, forcing him to look at her. “You freed  _ so many  _ prisoners today.  _ That  _ was your fault.”

Pidge is almost relieved to feel anger, since it’s something besides grief, as she shrugs Matt’s hands away and turns her back to him. “Don’t,” she snaps. “He—”

“Look at me, Pidge.”

Pidge sighs and reluctantly glances over her shoulder at her brother…and reminds herself of all the people  _ he’s  _ lost, however temporarily:  their father, Shiro, Teosh, countless other comrades in the rebellion… “What?” she says stonily.

“If there’s one thing I’ve learned in the rebellion,” Matt says, a sad smile on his face as he takes her hand, “it’s that we shouldn’t belittle anyone’s sacrifice, no matter what. And I for one am grateful to Lance.”

Pidge lets his words soak over her, lets them penetrate her mind, her very soul, hoping for some modicum of acceptance. But even though Lance – even though  _ they  _ – did so much good, it didn’t erase anything she felts – and still feels.

But to Matt she says, “I’ll…try to remember that.”

* * *

Lance’s jacket is Pidge’s sorry keepsake. No one questions her right to take it, to snatch it out of his room before anyone can even  _ think  _ of clearing out the rest of his belongings.

(They won’t, she thinks; it would break all their hearts to touch anything in his room.)

The jacket joins Matt’s old glasses in her growing collection of mementos, but she still wishes this separation would end as happy as that one had. And she takes to wearing it, along with the glasses.

It keeps her warm inside the chilly Castle halls, and for the first few days it still smells like him, like soap and peppermint and cow, and like a scent that’s just uniquely  _ Lance _ …strange, but not unpleasant, just like him.

Pidge wears the jacket like another suit of armor, the comfort to shield her from abject grief and heartache. Sometimes she lies on her bed, hugging herself and pretending he’s there too. She imagines she can feel him blowing warm air against the bare skin on the back of her neck, something he started doing in the last few weeks, something that made her shiver.

When she loses herself in thought like that though, she pinches herself alert and seeks out Hunk; she knows dwelling like that is unhealthy, especially when she starts zoning out during meetings – because the war rages on, heedless of any single soldier’s death.

Pidge and Hunk sit with Kaltenecker, who doesn’t seem to notice that her usual ‘farmhand’ no longer milks her. She’s content to stand for one of them, since Lance taught them how to perform the task in case he isn’t around.

_ “Where would you go?” Pidge asked with a snort. _

_ “Long-term mission, maybe?” Lance suggested. He stared between her hands, almost too small to properly grasp the cow’s udders, and laughed. _

_ Pidge’s cheeks burned as he knelt beside her, his hands on hers to guide her through the motions. Soon, Kaltenecker lowed in contentment, and Lance withdrew so she could practice on her own. _

_ She immediately missed his warmth. _

Pidge pats Kaltnecker’s head while Hunk milks her, strokes her nose and scratches her ears. Her fur is coarse and smells, reminding her a little of her own family’s dog, but mostly of Lance.

Kaltenecker noses at Pidge’s jacket pockets, as if expecting to find some treat there, and she giggles for the first time in what feels like ages.

Hunk glances up from his task and smiles. “What happened?” he wonders.

Pidge returns his smile as she nudges Kaltenecker’s head away. “She thinks I have something for her in my – in Lance’s – pocket.” Her smile falters, and a fresh wave of pain nearly overwhelms her. “Hunk, I…are you—” She cuts herself off, nearly choking on a sob, and turns away from Hunk. “Do you still need my help?”

“It’s okay, Pidge,” Hunk reassures her. “I can finish here. I’ll check on you later.”

“You don’t have to,” she tells him, but she’s already on her way back to her bedroom.

* * *

When Pidge can’t sleep during the night cycle, she wanders the Castle’s hallways. Despite her bone-deep weariness, her brain thrums with activity, spurring her into doing…something.

Whenever she’s wired like this she can’t sleep no matter how tired she is, and nothing claims her focus, not even a demanding puzzle. So instead she goes for a stroll, the Green Lion mentally keeping her company while the rest of the Castle sleeps or pretends to.

Once, the very thought of walking just for the sake of walking didn’t appeal to Pidge at all, but since coming into space she found herself doing it more often, sometimes wandering into the Green Lion’s hangar and acquainting herself better with the wonder of technology and, somehow,  _ nature  _ that shared her mind, and sometimes coming across an equally restless teammate.

Sometimes that teammate was Lance.

Pidge pauses outside the door to a hangar less familiar to her. She let her feet guide her, rather than her head, and the doors open to admit her, lights flickering on.

The Red Lion stands as tall as the Green Lion does, but his eyes don’t follow Pidge as she approaches. “Do you miss him too?” she asks, voice low. “Do you…think you could’ve done better?”

The Lion doesn’t answer.

“No,” Pidge continues, a hint of bitterness taking over. “Of course you don’t miss him. We’re all the same to you, aren’t we? We’re just…placeholders. Anyone with the right traits could fly you in a pinch, huh?” She clenches her hands into fists, scowling up at the living machine. “The Blue Lion was quick to dump Lance so you could take him, and did you even care how Keith must’ve felt when—”

“Pidge,” a soft, familiar voice interrupts her.

“Not now, Lance,” she hisses, her eyes still fixed on the Red Lion, but before she can continue her tirade, she freezes.

Pidge turns and sees him.

“ _ Lance? _ ” She stares at him, standing there looking as hale and healthy as the day they met, and for a few tics she can’t breathe as her eyes drink him in. “I’m…hallucinating,” she says faintly. “Or dreaming, or—”

Lance shakes his head, and Pidge finally registers that something is  _ very  _ wrong with what she’s seeing.

His figure is indistinct, almost blurry at the edges like an imperfect projection, and he’s wearing the Garrison cadet uniform. And though he smiles at her, it feels forced, like he’s putting it on for her benefit.

“I’ve been waiting here for a while,” Lance explains as Pidge slowly forces herself to approach him. His eyes flick up to the Red Lion before returning to her. “It’s kind of…his fault I’m still...here.” He rubs the back of his neck, and the gesture is so  _ Lance  _ that Pidge has to bite back a sob.

“Explain,” she tells him once she finally stands before him. She holds herself back from reaching out and touching him – grabbing his arm or grasping his fingers – lest a simple gesture cause him to vanish.

(Losing him once was torture enough; she doesn’t think she can survive it a second time.)

“I just did?” Lance says, raising an eyebrow at her. His smile widens though, and this time it’s genuine. And he makes a strange motion with his arms, holding them out before putting them back down again.

He wants to reach for her too, Pidge realizes, a too familiar ache in her chest.

“Not to my satisfaction,” she says, shaking her head and frowning at him. She meets his eyes and asks, “You’re not like…King Alfor’s AI, are you?”

Lance frowns. “I don’t think so?” he says. “I mean, I know I joked about that before, but…” He shrugs, crossing his arms and hunching his shoulders, and Pidge thinks he looks  _ cold _ . “I’m here, somehow…” He raises a hand and seems to stare through it. “Sort of, anyway.”

Pidge finally sates her curiosity – her  _ longing  _ – and reaches for that hand.

Her fingers pass through Lance’s without touching them; he’s a specter, indistinct and immaterial. Her eyes widen and she tries again, growling when she can’t touch him.

After several attempts, each one more infuriating than the last, she sobs, wrapping herself in the jacket she still wears and hiding her face in the collar.

“I…Pidge—”

“Don’t!” She inhales shakily, struggling to control her breathing before she full-on bawls in front of the same person she’s still mourning.

“Pidge,” he repeats softer, and something in his voice compels her to look up. “I’m so sorry.”

“Why?” she demands when their eyes meet. She scrubs furiously at her eyes, as if that’ll stop the flow of tears. “This…this isn’t your fault.”

“I-I know, but it’s—” He cuts himself off, and he inhales sharply too, and it’s so jarring that she realizes that it’s the first time he’s shown any sign of breathing at all.

It shocks her into a post-cry numbness, and she lowers her arms and stares at him, eyes wide.

The corner of Lance’s mouth ticks up into a smile, but it fades just as quickly. “I didn’t want to leave you – or anyone – with the pain, you know?”

Pidge nods, though she doesn’t really.

“I mean, I have – or  _ had  _ – no problem dying for the war effort, but I wish it didn’t hurt you like this.”

“Of course it does,” she says. She clasps her hands in front of her and stares down. “I – we all love you.” Quiznak, even when he’s  _ dead _ she can’t bring herself to say it, to tell him what he means to her.

She glances up again, her gaze darting from his face, to his hands, to the way he’s holding himself. Nothing is amiss, every detail is exactly as she remembers it – except for the way his lines blur, the way he isn’t quite three-dimensional.

“Are you real?” she asks him, having to force the words out, because she isn’t sure she wants to know the answer.

“Yes,” he exhales.

“If this is a dream—”

“It’s not.”

“But if it  _ is _ ,” she insists, “you’d still say the same thing, wouldn’t you?”

Lance crosses his arms and shrugs. “I don’t know, Pidge. I don’t know why I’m still here even though I…died.” His voice falters on that word, but he otherwise seems unaffected. “But I think my ‘continued existence’ is tied to the Red Lion somehow.” His eyes return to the living machine standing sentinel nearby.

Pidge follows his gaze, but to her the Lion stands as impassive as always.

“Why are you wearing those clothes?” she then wonders, her attention snapping back to him.

Lance, to her surprise, smiles, fingering the hem of his uniform shirt. “I think because this is what I was wearing when we met in life,” he says, “so it’s what I’m wearing now that I’m meeting you in death.”

Pidge blinks at him, doubting that he can find something so morbid so  _ amusing  _ – but this is Lance she’s dealing with. If anyone can make a joke in a bleak situation, it’s  _ him _ .

She wants to resent him for it, but all she feels is relief, at least for the moment, because this, somehow, is firmer evidence than anything she’s noticed so far that Lance is real.

But Pidge wishes she could touch him, just to make sure.

“And you’re wearing my jacket,” Lance observes.

There’s something teasing in his tone, so familiar that Pidge’s breath catches in her chest, and all she can do is nod, offering a lame, “Yeah.”

“It looks good on you.”

He says it so off-handedly, but it still brings heat to her cheeks. She stuffs her hands into the jacket pockets and avoids his eyes.

A strange tension settles over them, and Pidge wishes she knew what to say. None of the words that come to mind seem sufficient, so she bites her lip to keep herself from blurting something out.

“I do wish we’d had more time though,” Lance says, jerking Pidge from her thoughts.

“What?” she asks. “What do you mean?”

“If I had one regret,” he says, “that would be…it.” At Pidge’s continued silence, he adds, “I don’t regret taking a shot for you, Pidge.”

“I didn’t think you did.” She rubs her arms. “I almost wish you did though.”

“Why?”

“Because then you would be alive, and—”

“And you would be dead,” Lance points out. Before Pidge can argue with him, he says, “And what about your dad? You haven’t found him yet, so you still need to live.”

“And what about  _ your  _ family?” Pidge argues. “You were so  _ homesick _ , Lance! All of us were, but—” She cut herself off and finally crumbles to the ground, folding in on herself. “It’s not fair.”

“Pidge, please don’t cry again,” Lance practically  _ begs  _ her. “I don’t—I can’t— _ Pidge _ .” He crouches in front of her, so close that Pidge should be able to feel the heat of his body.

Pidge wonders how Lance can be so real and so close, yet so wrong and far away.

* * *

Somehow, Pidge falls asleep in the Red Lion’s hangar, curled up against his massive paw with Lance hovering nearby. She doesn’t want to return to her own bed to sleep lest Lance disappear before she wakes, and she struggles to keep her eyes open when not long ago it was a struggle to force them closed.

Pidge cracks her eyelids at the sound of someone calling her name. “Keith?” she mumbles, trying to rub the remnants of sleep from her eyes. She can’t recall anything she dreamed, or even if she did, but she does remember Lance.

Unless  _ he  _ was a dream too.

She bolts upright, almost knocking Keith down in her hurry to stand, and only a rush of dizziness makes her pause. “Where did he go?” she demands, spinning around and searching him out.

“Where did who go?” Keith asks, peering at her worriedly.

It then occurs to Pidge to wonder, “How did you know I was here?”

“Red told me,” he says, patting the Lion’s nearby paw.

Pidge frowns, slouching. “Of course,” she says. “Did he…tell you anything else?”

“Just that you’d fallen asleep here.” Keith furrows his eyebrows. “Pidge, are you—why were you sleeping  _ here _ ? You used to fall asleep in the Green Lion’s hangar all the time, but never here. You only ever came here with—” He cuts himself off, grimacing, and quickly says, “I’m sorry.”

Pidge shrugs, crossing her arms. “It’s fine,” she says, though they both know it’s not. She sits down again, leaning against the paw, and this time she feels…comforted by the Lion’s presence, if not to the same degree as she would be by the Green Lion’s, or Lance’s.

_ Especially _ Lance’s.

“Uh, Pidge?” Keith says, prompting her to look up at him.

“What?” At the question in his eyes, she sighs and asks, “Do you mind if I stay here a little longer? I just need to collect my thoughts.”

Keith stares at her for a few tics, then nods slowly. “Yeah, take your time. Just…not too much, okay?” He rests a hand on her shoulder – more affection than he would’ve shown her not too long ago – as he passes.

Pidge doesn’t watch him leave, instead staring around the hangar, hoping against hope to catch sight of Lance again and wondering if her imagination could be so cruel to conjure such a vivid vision of him.

It terrifies her that she would gladly accept another one like it.

When Lance doesn’t reappear for a few doboshes, Pidge struggles to her feet and starts for the door. Her chest aches with disappointment and the pain that’s become too familiar, but something like numbness – something uncomfortably like  _ despair  _ – settles in too.

But Lance stands in her path, and Pidge halts in her tracks.

“Where the hell did you go?” she demands. “I thought—quizank, I don’t even know what I thought.” She rubs her still-tired eyes and sighs.

“I’m not sure but I think I only really… _ manifest  _ when you’re around, and no one else.”

Pidge gapes at him. “What?”

“About two days after – after  _ that  _ – Keith came in here by himself,” Lance explains with a frown. “I tried to talk to him, but he didn’t hear or see me.” He shudders. “I don’t know, but I have a theory that you’re the only one that can see me.” Lance stares at her feet, running fingers through his hair.

Pidge inhales, not sure yet what to make of his words. “A hypothesis.”

“What?” Lance says, glancing up at her.

“You have a hypothesis,” Pidge corrects with a shrug. “A hypothesis is a testable prediction, but a theory has a lot of evidence supporting it, and you don’t have much evidence yet.”

Lance raises an eyebrow at her, then smiles. “Quiznak, I miss that.”

“Miss what?”

“ _ That _ ,” Lance says. He laughs. “Quiznak, Pidge, I miss  _ you _ , so much it…hurts. Or maybe it would hurt if I could still feel pain.”

Pidge shuffles her feet, awkward. There it is again, that tension. And she wants to comfort him, but she isn’t sure how, except:

“I miss you too, Lance,” she admits. “I miss you.” She rests her palm against her chest, where her heart thumps painfully, counting down the life she still has left to live without Lance.

The prospect of that hurts too.

“I wish you were somewhere else,” she continues, sniffling. “I wish I could find you like I found my brother.”

“I know,” Lance says.

“Quiznak,” she hisses. She presses the heels of her hands into her eyes, angry at herself for crying so much in the last day cycle.

“I know.” Lance stands close to her, his voice the only indication of his presence now that she covers her eyes. No warmth, no touch, no vibration of air passing through his throat and into his chest.

The ghost is so empty, devoid of any life, both less and more than a robot.

_ A robot… _

“Why…why are you still here?” Pidge wonders, looking up.

Lance frowns at her. “What do you mean? I told you—”

“No, you told me _ how _ ,” she says, “or at least what you think. But…why? What’s the point?”

“Ah, Pidge, it’s like you’re not happy to see me.”

“I’m not,” she snaps, but at his eyes widening with hurt, she quickly amends, “I am, but not like this.”

Lance nods in understanding and says, “Yeah, I get that. And I don’t know why, but Pidge…this isn’t  _ Casper _ .” He shrugs, hunching in on himself. “I don’t know, Pidge.”

“I’ll help you figure it out,” Pidge decides. Her spine stiffens with resolve, a purpose.

“I…okay,” Lance agrees easily, though she hears doubt in his voice.

It will be fine, Pidge tells herself, and if she has to lose Lance a second time?

So be it.

* * *

No one else can see Lance, though the Red Lion and Allura’s mice (but not Kaltenecker) seem sensitive to his presence in some way.

The mice approach him almost as eagerly as they approach anyone else, but they’re much quicker to disperse, as if animal instinct drove them to him before reason overcame it. And the Red Lion’s eyes fixate on him whenever they’re in his hangar, and Pidge begins to believe that his continued existence  _ is  _ tied to the Lion in some way.

Would this happen to the rest of them? Would their Lions’ survival ensure they revive as a restless, intangible soul?

Pidge hopes she’ll never find out.

Lance, at least, doesn’t seem to be confined to the hangar with the Red Lion, instead trailing after Pidge when she leaves and vanishing whenever someone else comes into sight. And when she asks, he tells her he doesn’t have any control over it.

“Why me?” she wonders once.

They’re in her bedroom, the only place in the Castle she’s guaranteed privacy. Pidge sits on her bed, writing her observations about Lance’s predicament in a journal, while he hovers nearby, unable to sit on anything corporeal.

“I’m not sure,” he admits, pacing the length of her room. The first time he did that, he walked around and stepped over the clutter littering her floor, but now he no longer bothered since he passed through anything solid.

“Was I the last person you saw before you…?”

“Yeah,” Lance says. He pauses, crossing his arms.

Pidge writes that possibility down. “Is there anything else you can think of?”

Lance stares at her for a tic, and shakes his head.

“Liar,” she accuses lightly.

“I don’t think that’s it,” he says doubtfully.

“But you  _ did  _ think of something.” She sighs, leaning against the wall beside her bed. “Lance, I know you don’t have much experience with experiments, but we need to consider every possibility.”

“What does it matter?” he demands, gesturing wildly around them. “Only you can see me! So what? That has nothing to do with whatever…all  _ this  _ is!” His arms sweep the room, taking in the whole situation.

Pidge inhales, struggling to keep her patience and to help Lance understand that  _ everything  _ is relevant. “Lance, you don’t know that for certain.”

“And what if I don’t want to talk about it?”

“It doesn’t change that it could be important,” Pidge retorts, resisting the urge to toss her journal aside in frustration.

“Oh, well, you know what I’ve been wondering, Pidge?” Lance snaps. Before she can reply, to tell him to  _ grow up  _ and stop being so petulant, he plows on, “ _ I’m  _ wondering how the quiznak I’m not falling through the floor.” He stomps a foot, then  _ jumps _ , landing without so much as a thud. Then he leans against the wall. “And why can’t I walk through walls? Why do I just… _ disappear  _ when someone else is around and  _ reappear  _ wherever  _ you  _ are?” He sits on the ground – the only chair available to him in this state – and wraps his arms around his legs, looking like a lost, confused child.

(They’re not so old that they can forget what that’s like.)

“I can’t even talk to  _ Hunk _ , Pidge,” he complains, sounding close to tears. “He’s been my best friend since middle school, and I can’t  _ talk  _ to him.”

Pidge climbs down from her bed and crouches beside him. Her hand hovers uselessly over his shoulder and she asks as gently as she knows how, “Do you want me to…tell him something for you?”

“What’s the use of that?” he demands without looking at her. “Will he even believe it’s me?” He scowls. “Do  _ you  _ even believe it’s me?”

“Of course I do, Lance!” she exclaims, frustrated all over again. “Quiznak, I’m  _ trying  _ to  _ help  _ you, moron!”

“Well, calling me a moron isn’t  _ helping _ , Pidge!”

Pidge growls, getting to her feet and pacing the floor. “Then quit  _ acting  _ like one!” she says, halting in front of him.

Lance stands and looks down at her from his superior height, but Pidge isn’t intimidated.

Their staring contest ends with a mutual forfeit. They both falter, Pidge’s eyes turning down in guilt while Lance tears his eyes away, frowning.

“I’m sorry,” he says, his back to her. “I know you’re…doing the best you can.”

“I shouldn’t have called you a moron,” she says, approaching him. If only she could reach out and touch him, even if just to squeeze his hand…

Lance says something, so quietly that Pidge has to ask him to repeat himself.

“You wanted to know what I was thinking?” he says, turning back to look at her. “Another reason I might be haunting  _ you _ ?”

Pidge shivers under the intensity of his gaze, but she keeps her composure and says, “Yes. Lance, it might—”

“I love you.”

Her eyes widen. “What?”

“I can’t believe I—” Lance runs his fingers through his hair again but holds eye contact. “Pidge, I love you. Or, I’m  _ in  _ love with you, and I don’t know if— _ maybe  _ it makes a difference?”

“I don’t…know,” she says faintly, still absorbing his words, his  _ confession _ . “I wish I knew.” She squeezes her eyes shut, cursing herself for all this  _ crying  _ she’s been doing.

“Pidge, no, don’t,” Lance says. He tries to grasp her wrists as she reaches up to wipe her face, but his fingers pass through without her sensing anything. He scowls, frustrated, and says, “Pidge, please say something. Just let me know you’re okay with this.”

“ _ Okay  _ with this?” Something like anger displaces the shock, and she understands she’s crying angry tears rather than sad ones. “You should’ve  _ told  _ me,” she chokes out, covering her face with her arm. “Why didn’t you  _ tell  _ me?”

“Because I—”

“I love you too, you  _ moron _ !” Pidge almost shrieks. “You didn’t—you—” It’s too much for the moment, and she spins on her heel and dashes out of her room, wanting to get as far away from Lance as possible.

She ignores him yelling for her to wait and makes a beeline for Kaltenecker’s field.

She doesn’t expect Hunk to be there, milking her, but there he is, seated on a stool with a bucket at his feet.

“Pidge,” he says, glancing up in surprise. He smiles, relief in his eyes, and she remembers guiltily that she’s become something of a recluse lately to the point where she’s begged Allura to exempt her from missions. “What’re you doing here? Did you want to milk Kaltenecker?”

Pidge’s eyes dart around, searching for…searching for Lance, but of course she can’t see him so long as she’s with Hunk. So she says, “Yeah, I miss it. So do you mind?”

“Of course not,” Hunk says. He stands obligingly, and she takes the stool, her hands automatically taking to the task. “We’ve missed you too, you know.”

“You have?” she asks without faltering. Milk splashes into the bucket in a steady stream, and Kaltecker moos.

“Yeah,” Hunk says. “You seemed to be doing fine, and then you disappeared on us again.”

“Hmm,” Pidge says, scowling. Then she looks at Hunk and asks, “Do you mind if I finish up here on my own? I kind of want a moment alone with my cow.”

Hunk’s eyes widen, but to her surprise he agrees, “Sure, I guess. Just bring me the milk when you’re done so I can Pasteurize it.”

“Sure,” she says, watching him until he leaves her sight.

Predictably, Lance appears crouching beside her. “I miss this too,” he admits, shrugging.

“I shouldn’t have run away,” she says carefully, still focusing on her task. “I just got…overwhelmed. And I wish you’d told me,” she adds reproachfully, glaring over at him.

Lance meets her eyes, and nods. “Yeah, I should’ve,” he says, and then he smiles, a trace of old, achingly familiar humor on his face. “I would’ve at least gotten the chance to kiss you, right?”

Pidge laughs despite the painful clenching in her chest. Nothing about this is funny, but the only alternative is crying.

And she’s so sick of that.

* * *

The mystery behind Lance’s continued existence haunts Pidge almost as much as Lance himself does, enough that she seeks Allura out to ask her if Alteans believe - or  _ believed  _ \- in ghosts.

Allura narrows her eyes at Pidge. “I’m sorry, but what is a  _ ‘ghost’ _ ?” she wonders. “The Castle’s universal translator doesn’t seem able to recognize that word.”

Allura meditates, something she’s apparently done since she was a child with too much energy and too few outlets for it. She taught them all her methods, usually after mandatory training sessions when they were too exhausted and sore to flee, but Pidge never took to them naturally.

Pidge’s mind is a buzzing thing and doesn’t understand the meaning of peace and quiet, but now she makes an effort to join Allura on an observation deck, facing the wide expanse of the universe and the blanket of stars that surrounds the Castle. Two of the mice lie napping between them, while the other two tame Allura’s hair into twin braids.

“A ghost is a spirit?” Pidge tries, glancing at Allura to assess her reaction. When she only nods, she continues, “Specifically, they’re like the spirit - or maybe  _ soul  _ is a better word - of someone that’s died, but they linger for some reason. Like, I guess some people on Earth believe that ghosts exist because they’re vengeful, or because they have unfinished business, or something.” She shrugs and quietly admits, “I didn’t believe in them.”

One of the napping mice shifts, its ear twitching, while the other squeaks in its sleep. Allura’s eyes flit down to them before returning to Pidge’s face, and she asks, “And you do now?”

Pidge rubs her arms, unsure if she imagines the sudden cold draft that touches her even through Lance’s jacket. And she nods.

“Are you wondering if Lance can return as one of these...ghosts?” Allura asks.

Pidge half-expects her to scold her for ‘wishful thinking’, or to tell her that she’s being foolish, or any number of things that seek to make her doubt that Lance isn’t, somehow, still with her. So when she nods ahead, she stiffens her shoulders, bracing herself for Allura’s pity.

Instead, she sighs and says, “The mice thought they sensed...something.” She gently picks up one of the sleeping mice by the scruff of its neck, cradling it in her hand. “At first I thought they were confused, picking up on someone’s lingering scent, but no…” She puts the mouse on her shoulder, then reaches for the other, but it rouses before she can touch it and scurries up her arm on its own.

“So  _ do  _ Alteans have something like ghosts?” Pidge says.

“Yes, but we call them specters,” Allura explains. “They can’t affect or touch anything around them, or so the myths say.” She uncrosses her legs, then pulls them closer to her body so that she sits leaning sideways, a faraway look in her eyes as she stares into space. “I suppose my father’s AI was the closest thing I ever knew to a ghost or a specter.”

“But what do the myths say?”

“According to the most prominent of the myths,” Allura says while she closes her eyes, as if remembering, “anyone that experienced prolonged exposure to quintessence of any kind would linger after death, especially if they died violently.”

“Quintessence exposure? But Lance--”

“The Lions,” Allura interrupts. She rests a hand on her heart, as if she can feel them there. “The Lions run on quintessence - it’s how they  _ live _ . It’s like--”

“Having a nuclear reactor,” Pidge realizes. “Becoming a ghost is like an effect of radiation poisoning.”

“I suppose that’s one way to think about it,” Allura says with a slight frown. “But all rumors of true specters on Altea - and beyond - were unverified, so this...if Lance is still with us as a specter, I’m afraid I don’t have all the answers for you, Pidge.”

Pidge sighs and wraps her arms around her legs. “Do you know how to... _ dispel  _ specters, or to make them move on?” At the question on Allura’s face, she continues, “So that they...die for real, so that their soul can be at rest, so that--”

“It depends on the individual,” Allura says. “That is to say, no two myths or unverified accounts agree, I’m afraid.” She smiles wryly, but then reaches over to pat Pidge’s hand before taking it in both of hers. “This must be a lot for you to take in.”

“No kidding.”

Allura squeezes her hand and doesn’t comment on how sweaty and  _ cold  _ her palm must be. “Altean specters were never considered vengeful spirits,” she reassures Pidge. “Angry, restless souls, perhaps, but they never haunted anyone out of malice.”

_ Lance, an ‘angry, restless soul’?  _ Restless, maybe, Pidge thinks as she pinches her lips together to keep from smiling, but not  _ angry _ .

“I believe, actually,” Allura continues, “that specters supposedly haunted the last person to see them alive. Though...I guess if they  _ were  _ murdered, then that would make them vengeful towards their murderer!” She chuckles, apparently entertained by that idea, and Pidge finally allows herself to smile.

Well, she considers, that’s one mystery solved.

* * *

Lance eventually consents to Pidge transcribing brief letters from him to their teammates.

“Tell Shiro that I wish I could’ve been more like him.”

“Tell Keith that he’s not that bad and I’m glad we we’re friends.”

“Tell Coran that I have no idea what he’s talking about half the time, but he’s like a second father to me.”

“Tell Hunk he’s the best friend anyone could ask for, and that I’m sorry I won’t make it to his and Shay’s wedding.”

(Pidge pinches her lips together for that one, trying not to smile.)

“Tell Allura that I’m sorry I’ll never reciprocate her feelings for me.”

That one gives Pidge pause, and she narrows her eyes at Lance, who stands beside her desk in the Green Lion’s hangar with his hands on his hips. “Seriously?” she says.

Lance rolls his eyes. “It’s a joke, Pidge.”

Pidge touches the tip of her pen to the paper. “So do you want me to write it, or—”

“Yeah, Allura will get that it’s a joke.” He sighs, paces a few times, before stopping beside Pidge again.

Pidge writes it, her hand freezing when she reaches the end of the sentence. “Do you wish that Allura—”

“No.”

“But—”

“Nope,” Lance insists. He sits next to her on the floor, crossing his legs and resting his hands in his lap.

“You don’t even know what I was gonna ask,” Pidge complains, rubbing her face with her free hand.

“I have a pretty good idea.” He hums and seems to consider something before lying down, stretching his legs so that his feet point towards the Green Lion.

“Oh, yeah?” Pidge says, raising an eyebrow at him. “What’s your  _ idea _ ?”

“Hmm, well,” Lance says contemplatively, holding his hand up and examining his fingernails, “you were going to ask if it would be different if Allura  _ did  _ like me at the right time.”

Pidge scowls, crossing her arms. Of course he would know her as well as she knows him; it’s only fair. “And the answer to that is  _ no _ ?”

Lance finally meets her eyes again and admits, “I guess I don’t actually know. But”—he brightens a bit, smiling at her—“I’m glad I’ll never find out.”

The idea of being  _ glad  _ that someone will never solve a known mystery is enough to drive Pidge up a wall, usually, but in this case she thinks she’s glad too.

Letters complete, Pidge tears the five pages out of her journal and shows each one to Lance. He sits back up and reads them to verify what she wrote is what he wants to tell.

“Have I ever told you that your handwriting is terrible?”

“Do you want me to deliver these letters or not?”

Lance chuckles but doesn’t reply except to say, “I want one more letter.”

Pidge blinks at him but grabs her pen, ready to write again. “Who’s it for? Matt? Your family?”

“Well, I’ll want one for my family too eventually,” Lance says, shrugging when she glances at him, “but this one is for you.”

“Oh…” Pidge reflexively reaches up to wipe her tears, only to discover that they’re not there. But there’s still a lump in her throat and her chest still aches as she transcribes Lance’s words to  _ her _ .

* * *

Pidge overthinks delivering the letters.

“Ironic,” Lance quips as she stares at the pile of paper in her lap, “considering this was  _ your  _ idea.”

“Shut up,” Pidge groans. She picks one up at random – it’s tied into a scroll with a red ribbon, so must be the one addressed to Keith – and stares at it. Maybe she can make it look nicer, or perhaps not try so hard; after all, they’re written on lined paper roughly torn out of her journal. Who cares about presentation?

“Now you’re just procrastinating.” Lance leans down so he can look her in the eye.

She used to hate when he did that, making light of her height compared to everyone else aboard the Castle. No one else needed someone to  _ bend down  _ to make eye contact with them.

Except Pidge likes being at eye level with Lance, witnessing the brightness in his dark blue eyes, and really, he put in this effort for her so she wouldn’t have to tilt her head back or stand on her toes.

“I don’t know how to do this,” Pidge confesses. She plays with the end of a ribbon, avoiding Lance’s eyes.

“Just drop them off at everyone’s rooms,” Lance suggests.

“They’ll recognize my handwriting. And except for Allura, they’ll think I’m crazy, or making this up, or not  _ coping _ .” She tosses the letters aside, into a pile on her bed, and pulls her legs up. “And I’m  _ not  _ coping, Lance. Even if you’re real, this isn’t… _ coping _ .” She rests a hand on her stomach, trying to remember the last time she felt hungry. She hasn’t slept for more than a few hours at a time in even longer, and she doesn’t relish the company of her friends – or even her brother – as much as before.

Pidge has withdrawn, and she knows they’ve all noticed.

“Well, Alteans sort of believe in ghosts, right?” Lance says tentatively.

Pidge thinks of her conversation with Allura, and how she swore her to secrecy, and sighs. After standing, she gathers up the letters and decides, “I guess there’s only one way to do this.”

Since the Lions can detect Lance in some way, she walks into each hangar in turn. First the Yellow Lion, the one with which she’s most familiar other than her own after all the time she spent helping Hunk modify him. Yellow lowers his jaw with no prompting from her, and she stands in the cockpit, staring at the darkened viewscreen.

“ _ Can  _ you see him too?” she asks the Lion. She selects the letter tied with a yellow ribbon and sets it in the pilot’s chair. “You’ll tell Hunk it’s real, right? That even though it’s my handwriting, they’re Lance’s words?”

The Yellow Lion rumbles beneath Pidge’s feet, and though she has no direct link into his mind, she accepts it for an affirmative.

The Black Lion is next, and Pidge clutches the scroll with the violet ribbon close to her chest as she stares up at it. The Black Lion is imposing and judgmental in a way that none of the other Lions are, and except for those months without Shiro, no one other than him or Keith has set foot inside the Black Lion’s cockpit alone.

“Please?” she says to the Lion, voice low. She can see Lance nearby from the corner of her eye, but she doesn’t seek his advice. “It’s a letter for Shiro from Lance, and this is the best way I can think of for him to understand it’s not fake.”

Pidge exhales in relief when, after a few tics of deliberation, the Black Lion obligingly lowers its jaw.

She doesn’t linger inside the cockpit like she did with the Yellow Lion, instead only dropping the letter on the seat and leaving both Lion and hangar behind without another word, not even from Lance.

He stiffens almost imperceptibly when they’re inside the Blue Lion’s hangar, and he remains at the entrance, wary of approaching further. Pidge doesn’t question him – she suspects he never really got over Blue’s rejection, even when she allowed him to fly her again at times – and steps forwards alone.

Blue accepts her plea without convincing, and Pidge drops the letters with the pink and orange letters into the pilot’s seat, knowing Allura will make sure Coran gets his. And she isn’t sure she imagines it, but before she leaves she thinks she feels a blanket – a cool balm for the nerves – over her mind, a sensation both unfamiliar and comforting.

The Red Lion is less of a trial than Pidge expects. He lowers his jaw before she can even ask, and after glancing at Lance, who shrugs in reply at her silent inquiry, she enters.

Pidge hasn’t been inside the Red Lion since Lance was alive, and the red lights of the cockpit washing over her almost cause her to stumble. She half-expects Lance himself to be sitting in the seat, to look over his shoulder at her, a smirk on his lips, and brag about how many Galra ships he took down on his own.

The seat is empty, of course, except for the letter she drops into it.

* * *

“What the quiznak is  _ this _ ?”

The first sign that someone approached was Lance vanishing mid-sentence, the second the thundering of angry footsteps outside the Green Lion’s hangar entrance. She glances up from her work – an attempt at normalcy, the first she’s made in too long – to see Keith in his Paladin armor, glaring down at her.

He waves a page torn from her journal in her face.

“It’s a letter,” she says as calmly as she can.

“I know it’s a quiznaking  _ letter _ , Pidge,” he retorts. He tosses the paper onto her desk, eyeing it like it was a venomous insect that threatened to bite him as it flutters down. “It’s in your handwriting, but it’s from  _ Lance _ ? What kind of sick joke is that?”

Pidge pinches her eyes shut, trying to stem the anger she feels at his accusation. “It’s not a joke,” she tells him.

“Really?” Keith says, crossing his arms. “You expect me to believe that Lance knew he was going to die”—Pidge flinches—“and so wrote a letter for me through  _ you _ ?”

“That’s because he can’t write them himself.”

“That’s because he’s  _ dead _ , Pidge!” Keith yells, waving his hands around. “He’s gone, and I miss him too, but that doesn’t mean we can just—just  _ pretend _ !” He rubs his face, visibly struggling to rein in his temper. “I know you’re hurting, Pidge, but we have to keep fighting.”

“I know,” Pidge snaps. She shuts her computer and stands up. “I  _ know _ he’s dead, okay? I was with him when he died, so just…lay off!” She picks up her computer, hugging it to her chest, but before she storms out she retorts, “And it’s  _ real _ , Keith. Do you really think anyone else would have a bad enough sense of humor to say  _ ha, at least I beat you to martyrdom _ ?”

Keith stares at her, eyes widening. He grabs the discarded letter from her desk and scans it again. “I don’t want to believe what Red said,” he admits grudgingly.

“What did Red tell you?” Pidge asks, forcing something soothing into her tone.

Keith crosses his arms, shoulders hunching and posture closed. “That Lance isn’t gone,” he says, scowling. “He’s dead but he’s not gone.” His eyes snap up to Pidge’s. “You can still see him, can’t you?”

Pidge nods, unsurprised by how quick Keith is to believe her. She shouldn’t be though; Keith is no skeptic.

“Is he in here now?” Keith wonders. His gaze darts around the hangar, barely lingering in any one spot.

“Not exactly,” Pidge says. “I can only see him when no one else is around.”

“Oh, that’s…” Keith sighs. “I’m sorry, Pidge.”

“For what?”

“My reaction.” He rolls the letter back up, tucking it into the collar of his armor for safekeeping. “It’s a lot to take in.”

“I didn’t believe it at first either.” She huffs a laugh though nothing about this is humorous. “It  _ is  _ unbelievable.”

“Yeah, well, lots of crazy stuff has happened since we got here,” Keith says. He glances around the hangar again. “I...have a mission.”

“Okay,” Pidge says softly.

“I’ll see you later, Pidge.” With that, he leaves, briefly touching her arm on his way out.

Pidge sags against her desk, crumbling to the floor, while Lance reappears kneeling in front of her.

“I haven’t wanted to hit Keith so badly in a while,” he says, scowling in the direction Keith went.

“I don’t blame him for his reaction,” Pidge tells him. She tilts her head back against the side of the desk.

Lance sits beside her, so close that their shoulders  _ should  _ brush. “I don’t either,” he says, “but you…” He shakes his head. “You’re so much stronger than I am, Pidge. I don’t think I’d be able to deal with this.”

“You’re dealing with it,” she points out.

“I meant, if we switched places. If I still lived and you were the ghost.”

“Oh,” Pidge says lamely. She avoids his eyes and adds, “I feel like I’m barely dealing.”

“Hey, at least you have my jacket, right?” Lance says, the barest hint of teasing in his voice. “If you were dead and I was alive, what of yours would I even keep? Your glasses?”

“They were my brother’s.”

“Exactly!” Lance laughs, his hand resting on hers for a tic before passing straight through it. “See? Nothing of yours.”

Pidge manages a smile of her own, though the sight of their hands merged together, with no sense of touch between them, turns her stomach.

She can only hope the rest of the team accepts their letters half as well as Keith did.

* * *

Coran bawls like a baby, slumping forward while Pidge awkwardly pats his back. “He was s-s-so  _ young _ , Number Five,” he gasps, sniffing loudly.

Pidge has much sympathy for Shiro, who has the sorry task of embracing Coran, his shirt acting as an unintentional handkerchief.

Shiro, for his part, accepted the news about as easily as Keith did, but with far less arguing. He secluded himself for a single day cycle, even turning Keith away when he brought him food, but after that he emerged much the same as before, his emotions contained and pushed aside in favor of the war effort.

Allura’s composure didn’t break so much as it crumbled, allowing her a careful retreat after she returned from a solo mission in the Blue Lion. She made her report to the rest of them, even personally filed more data than she usually did, as if seeking solace in a mundane task, and left as the first tears streamed down her cheeks, her pink marks gleaming. But like Shiro, she compartmentalized; and unlike Shiro, she could speak of Lance in a level voice, though for the first few days she was quick to excuse herself afterwards.

(Apparently knowing that Lance is around beforehand didn’t do much to prepare her for the fresh wave of grief.)

Hunk is much like Coran, but his pain strikes Pidge deeper. By then everyone else has found their letters, so when he comes across his, he asks Pidge to sit with him while he reads it.

Pidge unhappily – but by no means reluctantly – obliges. She lends Hunk her shoulder to cry on, returning the favor for all the times he’s done the same for her.

“Oh, Pidge,” he says once his voice is steady, “why didn’t you tell me?”

“Tell you what?” she says, wiping away her own sympathetic tears.

“That you can still see Lance.”

“I didn’t think you’d believe me,” Pidge says.

Hunk’s grip on her hand tightens, and Pidge realizes that now their positions are reversed and he’s comforting her all over again. “As bad as it is for the rest of us—”

“Please don’t,” Pidge interrupts, covering her face with her hand. “We all love him, okay? I’m not special just because I might’ve loved him in a different way.”

“So you admit it?”

“Yes,” she says grudgingly. “There’s no point in hiding it. It turns out it was all a waste of time anyway.”

Hunk sighs, patting her shoulder. “I told him to tell you how he felt.”

“It’s…fine,” Pidge says. “I’ll be fine.”

“I know you will,” says Hunk.

Pidge leans against Hunk’s side, and they sit in comfortable silence for a few moments, but then she smiles teasingly and asks, “So you’re not going to comment on the fact that Lance is sad he’s missing your  _ wedding _ ?”

Predictably, Hunk shoves her away, and Pidge laughs, feeling lighter than she has in too long.

* * *

They don’t form Voltron anymore, not because they can’t, but because they no longer  _ need  _ to.

They never face the full might of the Galra Empire anymore, now that it’s on its last legs, and when they deploy it’s always only three Lions at most.

It leaves Pidge with time to think - some of which she spends searching for her father’s whereabouts - but there’s only so much she can find to occupy herself while they have a war to fight.

Pidge tries to shut out the pain of losing Lance, to forget it and focus on what she can still do to help people that live. Even before, when her brother and father went missing, she didn’t know how to handle the grief, so she threw herself into finding them, into damming up all the negative feelings.

Logically, Pidge knows that Lance’s presence is making it difficult for her to move past her grief. When she sees him she wallows, and when she doesn’t she almost forgets, until she’s alone again and the sea of emotions trapped behind the dam threatens to burst free and overwhelm her.

She both wants to see him, and wants to avoid him, and the best way to avoid him is to decline solo missions, which is why she enlists Hunk’s help in liberating a poorly guarded prison colony that she should be able to handle alone.

They approach in the Green Lion, built for stealth, and as soon as they’re within sight of the guard satellite Hunk infiltrates it alone while Pidge waits for his signal.

Lance appears, dressed in his blue Paladin armor, as soon as Hunk disappears from the viewscreen, and without preamble he accuses, “You’ve been avoiding me.”

Pidge’s hands tighten around the Green Lion’s controls, and she rumbles, the floor vibrating beneath her feet. But she quietly admits, “Yes.”

Lance stands next to her, hands on his hips as he appraises Pidge. “Why?” he asks.

Pidge closes her eyes when she hears the heartbreak in his voice. “I can’t be with you all the time, Lance,” she tells him. “It’s either you or everyone else.”

“I get that,” Lance says, kneeling beside her seat so that he has to look up to meet her eyes, “but lately it’s been... _ less _ .”

Pidge resists the urge to ask Hunk for his status - potentially blowing his cover - to dismiss Lance, to avoid his questioning, but she has to face him. “One day,” she says carefully, voice trembling slightly, “you’ll be gone,  _ again _ , and it’s going to be  _ awful _ .” She looks away from the viewscreen, towards Lance to see the frown on his face, and she wishes she could wipe it away, but then she would have to lie. “I need to distance myself from you sometimes, Lance, because if I don’t, what’ll I do when you’re gone a  _ second  _ time, and this time for good?”

That finally gives Lance pause. He laughs humorlessly, rubbing at his chin, and says, “I didn’t think about it that way, Pidge.”

“Maybe it’s selfish of me--”

“It’s not,” Lance says. He stares at her hand on the controls and adds, “I think I understand.”

“I still love you, Lance,” Pidge says carefully, “so--”

“Pidge?” Hunk says into her ear, the speakers in her helmet buzzing with static. “Are you there?”

Pidge activates the microphone, and, after a sideways glance to see that Lance is already gone again, says, “Yes, I’m here. Are you ready for me to pick you up?”

“That would be nice, yes,” Hunk says.

Pidge sucks in a sharp breath, eyes darting around the cockpit, but then she ignores Lance flickering in and out of her sight as best she can while she steers the Green Lion towards the satellite. “I’m ready, Hunk,” she says once she docks Green right outside the pod hangar.

The hangar doors slide open, and out shoots Hunk, right in time for the Green Lion’s jaws to snap shut around him. Within tics he walks into the cockpit and throws Pidge a thumbs up.

“How’d it go?” she asks.

“Like Shiro thought, it’s not well manned.” Hunk rolls his eyes at the ceiling, frowning thoughtfully. “Guards incapacitated, communications down, and”--he smiles triumphantly--”security protocol completely disrupted and now being monitored by us.” The display in his armor’s gauntlet turns on, and Pidge’s own gauntlet chirps in recognition after he shares the information with her.

“All right,” Pidge says, fixing her gaze back on the viewscreen - and towards the prison colony ahead. “Let’s go.”

Pidge guides the Green Lion through the planet’s atmosphere; the readings the Green Lion takes signal that it’s not breathable for them or for any of the species they assume are held captive here. Sulfur compounds, carbon dioxide, ozone, trace amounts of oxygen and nitrogen... 

The planet’s surface is dead, nothing but stone and sand, but ahead is a wide, low structure.

A hovercraft shoots straight towards the Green Lion and sends a hailing signal. Pidge glances at Hunk, and at a nod, she accepts their incoming message.

The face on the other end isn’t Galra, but  _ human _ .

“ _ Dad? _ ” Pidge gasps, leaning forward.

“ _ Katie? _ ” Sam Holt says, eyes wide. “What’re you  _ doing  _ here?  _ Is  _ that you?”

“Yes!” Pidge says. Relief makes her body sag, at least until Hunk approaches.

He asks Sam, “What’s happening inside the building?”

Sam turns his head to look towards something off-screen, then says, “Come into the prison. I’ll explain there.”

The hovercraft turns around, and the Green Lion follows, looking very much like it’s chasing a mouse...a cat playing with its food.

Pidge’s father leads them into a vehicle bay. The doors slide shut as soon as the Green Lion’s tail enters, and when she and Hunk set foot from the Lion, the sensors on their helmets indicate that the air in here is safe to breathe.

But Pidge pays no mind to that, since two figures now approach them, and one of them is her father, walking with a slight limp and looking wearier and grayer than she remembers. But he’s unmistakable.

Pidge sprints to him and flings her arms around his shoulders. He stumbles backs, laughing with obvious relief, as he hugs her tightly. He’s warm, and alive, and  _ here _ , where she can make sure he gets to safety as soon as she and Hunk find out what’s going on.

“So what’s going on?” Hunk is quick to ask, disrupting their reunion.

Pidge reluctantly lets go of her father, but he keeps an arm around her shoulders, holding her close. And Sam explains, “The prisoners took over.”

“What?” Pidge says, stunned.

Sam’s companion, a tall humanoid alien with icy blue skin and white hair, says, “The Galra guards and sentries have been dwindling for a few months. The prisoners have always outnumbered them, but it grew to the point where we had hope of overpowering them and staging a takeover.”

“And we did,” Sam says with a grin.

“It’s thanks to Sam that we succeeded,” says the blue man, clapping Sam on the back. “He encouraged us when we were downtrodden; the guards liked to taunt him with tales about Voltron not coming to save  _ him _ .”

“Now I know why,” Sam adds, his eyes returning to Pidge, a proud smile on his face.

Pidge stares at her father; he might have been a high-ranking official at the Galaxy Garrison, but it’s nearly impossible to imagine him leading his own miniature rebellion, inspiring others to follow him. “Did you plan an escape?”

“Ah, no,” Sam admits, scratching the uneven gray stubble on his chin. “That was our next hurdle.”

“It takes much of our effort to feed ourselves and our new prisoners,” says his companion.

“What about the security satellite?” Hunk wonders. “Weren’t you worried they would send for backup?”

“They did,” the blue man says darkly, and Sam nods in confirmation.

Pidge shivers; war and the fight for survival changed them all.

“Unfortunately, the pods the reinforcements brought weren’t enough to evacuate,” Sam adds, “and they only kept enough here for Empire personnel, so if the air and ventilation systems inside fail…”

“You’ll suffocate to death,” Pidge finishes. She glances at Hunk, and at a brisk nod, she suggests, “Let’s call the Castle. We need them to land so we can evacuate everyone.”

“I’ll call them, Pidge,” Hunk says. He smiles and adds, “You should spend time with your dad while I do.”

“Are you sure?”

“Yeah, it’s not like this is a job that requires two people,” he tells her, rolling his eyes.

A plan of sorts decided, Sam takes Pidge with him further into the prison, leaving his blue companion - introduced as Nale - with Hunk. She follows him through bare brown hallways utterly lacking in the purple and red of the Galra aesthetic, dimly lit with flickering lights.

“How long have you been here?” Pidge asks her father.

“I don’t know,” he admits. “Since I was separated from Matt and Shiro.” Then his eyes widen and snap to Pidge. “Matt--”

“Is safe,” Pidge quickly reassures him. “Or, as safe as any of us are out here.” She smiles and adds, “He’s with the rebellion, living the science fiction dream.”

Sam laughs. “And Shiro?”

“You’ll be able to see him again before you see Matt,” she says.

“Good, good.” Then he frowns, but before Pidge can ask him what’s wrong - before she can start to glean what sort of burdens he bears - he smiles again and asks, “So you’re a Paladin of Voltron?”

“Yeah. The Green one, as you can see.” She holds her arm out, so he can see her armor.

“And that other one is the Yellow Paladin?”

Pidge smiles. “Yeah, that’s Hunk. I actually met him at the Garrison; he was on my team there.” She smiles just a bit wider, though she isn’t sure she wants her father to know about  _ all  _ the things she did in her search for him and Matt.

“Tell me about the others?” Sam suggests while he leads her to whatever destination he seems to have in mind.

“Well, Shiro is the Black Paladin, and our fearless leader. He...kind of reminds me of you sometimes, even though he’s closer to Matt’s age. Keith is the Red Paladin, except he flew the Black Lion for a little while. That’s...kind of a long story.”

“Keith?” says Sam, frowning. “That name sounds familiar.”

Pidge snorts. “Either Shiro talked about him, or you heard it around the Garrison.” Oh, wouldn’t  _ Lance  _ love to hear that even her father had heard of Keith; she can’t wait to--

She halts that thought in its tracks and continues, “Princess Allura is the Blue Paladin, but she also sort of flies the Castle.”

“Princess?  _ Flying Castle _ ?” Sam pauses and raises an eyebrow at her. “This sounds a lot like those  _ animes  _ that you and Matt liked.”

She laughs and says, “It took a while to get used to. But Allura is - or was, I guess, since it’s all gone - the princess of Altea. Her father built the Lions.”

“Hmm, it sounds like I won’t get a chance to meet  _ him _ ,” Sam says. “But who flies the Blue Lion when Princess Allura flies the Castle?”

Pidge’s heart thumps painfully in her chest. “It’s more like...who flies the Castle when Allura flies the Blue Lion,” she says, clasping her hands together. Suddenly she misses the comfort - however thin - of Lance’s jacket, and her eyes feel hotter than they should.

“Katie,” her father says softly. When Pidge looks up at him, he asks, “Your team lost someone, didn’t they?”

“Shiro, for a while,” she lies, though she can’t think why. “That’s why...that’s why Keith flew the Black Lion, and Lance--” She puts a hand to her face, annoyed with herself for her inability to simply  _ explain _ , but she dismisses it for now, and focuses on her father again. “You’ll get to meet them soon, but you wanted to show me something now?”

Sam appraises her for a few tics, but then he nods and says, “Yes, I wanted to ask your and your teammates’ opinion on what we should do with our prisoners.” He leads her down the hall again until they reach a cell door. He opens it using a lowtech keypad, and when a buzzer sounds, he pushes the door open.

Inside a large, dark cell sits no less than ten living Galra soldiers. There’s barely any ventilation, so the air smells musty and stale, enough that Pidge coughs.

The former prison guards sit slumped, but when one looks up at the sound of the door opening, his yellow eyes gleam in the brighter light from the hallway.

A shiver runs down Pidge’s spine right as he stands and jumps for Sam.

Pidge is quick to stand between them, her bayard summoned and shield up. The shield takes the brunt of the ex-guard’s momentum, but he still pushes her into Sam.

“Call for backup,” she tells him.

“Wait, no, I have a--”

“Dad, you’re not a fighter,” she interrupts, and before she can say anything else, the others in the cell stir, as if this one’s attack is enough to break them from their stupor.

They come at Pidge and Sam en masse, while Sam fumbles with a short-range communication device. Pidge coms Hunk with her helmet, and as she forms a one-woman blockade in the doorway, holding up her shield - low on power after all the hits it already took - and slashing with her bayard.

“Hunk, we need backup with the soldier prisoners!”

“On our way, Pidge,” he replies immediately.

The com clicks off right as Pidge’s shield finally fails, and the ex-guard attacking her shoves her out of the way. Her ankles twists on her way down, and she cries out at the sudden pain shooting up her leg. And when her back collides with the floor, the fall knocks the air out of her in a huff, and she lies there for a few tics, winded.

Distantly she can see Sam hold up a blaster and nonlethally shoot two of the Galra soldiers, but they overwhelm him too, even as he reasons with them, “This isn’t wise! You’ll still be outnumbered--”

“Victory or death,” one of them says dismissively, his massive hand around Sam’s neck.

It’s enough to snap Pidge back to attention, adrenaline pumping through her blood, and she jumps to her feet and shoots her bayard’s grapple at the Galra.The cord wraps around him, and she sends an electrical current down the wire.

He shudders and shouts at the electrocution, and when it abates, he drops Sam, who crawls away and takes aim at him again. This time, he strikes him in the ear, felling him at once.

It’s a shot worthy of Lance.

Voices trail from down the hallway, and the sound of a fight commencing reaches them. But Pidge shuts it out in favor of approaching her father, who still kneels on the ground.

She grabs his arms and helps him to his feet, but he shakes her off as soon as she’s upright.

“Maybe that was...foolish of me, to bring you here without backup.”

“I’ve been in tighter spots,” she tells him, but rather than reassure him it just serves to deepen his frown.

Once the ex-guards are subdued - and more than half of them are cut down, taking the maxim ‘victory or death’ as seriously as they do - the survivors are corralled into the cell again, and Pidge admits to her father that she can’t vouch for the Coalition’s mercy.

“Pidge!” says Hunk after the fight. He grabs her shoulders and examines her. “Are you all right?”

“I’m fine,” she says, trying to smile at him. But it’s difficult, because the fight leaves her drained, her ankle throbbing, and she can barely put any of her weight on it.

Hunk frowns, obviously doubtful, but rather than pressing the issue he says, “Well, the Castle is on its way. It should land on the planet’s surface in about five doboshes.”

“Great,” Pidge says. She limps towards the wall and leans against it, then asks her father, “Can you gather everyone in a common place to evacuate? Maybe outfit them with whatever they need to survive outdoors for a few minutes; the Castle’s too big to fit inside the vehicle bay.”

Sam, amazingly, smiles as he says, “Of course.” He calls to a few of his fellows, and together they leave to carry out Pidge’s suggestions.

Pidge wants to go with him, but she can barely walk on her ankle. Instead she lets Hunk sling her arm around his shoulders and guide her back the way they came.

“How do you feel, Pidge?” Hunk wonders.

“Tired, and my foot hurts,” she complains, though she knows that’s not what he meant.

“About finding your dad, Pidge,” he says with a trace of impatience.

Pidge stares at the ground, tracking their slow, uneven progress towards the vehicle bay. “Relieved,” she says, glancing towards Hunk. “Exhausted, like I can sleep for ten thousand years without the help of a cryopod.”

Hunk snorts and says, “Don’t let Allura or Coran hear you say that.”

Pidge cracks a smile. “Wouldn’t dream of it.”

Hunk - and Shiro come down from the Castle - ends up supervising evacuations along with her father. Pidge witnesses the reunion between Shiro and Sam, watches them hug like long-lost brothers, and something inside her shifts. They’re kindred spirits, she thinks, after they both suffered unimaginable traumas - because she  _ knows  _ her father must be worse than he seems, and worse than he’ll ever tell her. And that leaves her heart aching in sympathy...and loneliness.

Pidge is alone when she returns the Green Lion to her hangar. That is, alone...except for Lance.

“It was a good shot, don’t you think?” she asks him the tic she sees him, to head off any other questions or observations he might have.

Lance still wears the Paladin armor, like he did earlier, but now there are scratches and scorch marks on it as if he lived through a fight alongside them. There’s even a spiderweb of cracks on his visor, and he takes the helmet off. He smiles at Pidge and says, “It was. I’m...happy for you.”

Pidge turns her head to look at him. “Then why do you sound so reluctant?”

Lance sighs and shrugs. “I don’t know.”

And then it hits Pidge that Lance’s specter isn’t so much Lance as a copy of him. It sounds like him, shares his mannerisms and emotions, but like an android built to resemble a human, it’s still...off.

Lance speaks through her epiphany, “I wish I was there with you, and I hate how hard it is for you to just  _ talk  _ about me.”

“It’ll get better,” she says quietly, hollowly, “won’t it?”

“I hope so,” Lance says, running gloved hands through hair that should be soft to the touch, “for your sake.”

Pidge rubs her aching ankle, and Lance kneels beside her after setting his helmet on the floor. He makes as if to help her take off her boot, and when he laughs wryly at himself, she smiles, because maybe she wants the original back, but the copy might be better than nothing.

* * *

The war ends, and the Galra dwindle, Zarkon long since lost to the rift between realities. Voltron functions as a unit again, back down to five Paladins for five Lions.

But Lance still lingers, haunting Pidge both literally and figuratively. The pain in her chest fades, but she suspects that won’t disappear completely until Lance does.

And despite her brief attempt at avoidance, she doesn’t want to think about that.

“We can go home,” Pidge tells him once, late in the night cycle. She lies in bed, staring up at the ceiling, while Lance – wearing his blue pajamas and Blue Lion slippers rather than the Garrison uniform – leans against the wall beside her.

“You don’t sound excited,” Lance says.

“I am,” she says. She rolls onto her side, to better look at him. “But it…won’t be the same without you.”

Lance sighs and kneels on the floor so he can look her in the eye. “I know,” he says.”

“I’ll see my mother again. I can take Matt and my dad home.” A lone tear leaks from her eye and rolls down her cheek.

Lance reaches forward, as if to catch it, but he scowls when he can’t. “I can’t believe I’m still not used to this.”

“Not used to what?”

“Not being able to touch you,” he explains. He frowns at his upraised hand and continues, “I took it for granted before, just…hugging and leaning and everything.”

“I know,” Pidge agrees.

“And now, nothing.” He meets her eyes, his face so close to hers that she should be able to feel the warmth of his breath on her cheeks. “I want to kiss you but I can’t.”

Something in her stomach flutters, at odds with the ever-present pain in her chest. “Me too,” she says, voice quiet and with eyes pinched shut.

“Do you ever dream about me, Pidge?”

Pidge smiles very slightly. “Do you dream at all, Lance?”

“Oh, very funny,” he scoffs. When Pidge opens her eyes, she sees his face is serious.

So she says, “Yes, sometimes.”

“What about me?”

She hums, rolling onto her back. “Sometimes sweet dreams, the kind where you hold my hand and tease me”—she touches her lips—“and kiss me awake.”

“Awake?”

“It always ends when you kiss me, in those dreams, like Snow White or Sleeping Beauty.”

“I want it to be like that,” Lance says wistfully.

Pidge reaches over, grazing his fingertips with her own – or trying to.

“What else?”

“Nightmares, sometimes,” Pidge admits, lowering her voice. She almost hopes he won’t hear her, but of course he does.

“I know,” he says. “You sometimes…talk in your sleep.”

Pidge turns her head, raising an eyebrow at him, and when their eyes meet she  _ snorts _ , suddenly amused by how much this all sounds like a young adult romance novel. “Do I  _ really _ ?” she demands.

“Sometimes,” Lance shrugs. “I can’t make out what you say; I just know you’re saying  _ something _ .”

“Hmm.” She decides to believe him, because the alternative is too embarrassing.

It’s the first time she’s been able to feel embarrassed around him for a while, as  _ intimate  _ – if rather distantly – as they’ve been.

(She shuts out the memory of the shower they took together – for  _ science _ , of course.)

“What are the nightmares about?” Lance asks, blessedly jerking Pidge from her thoughts.

“Your death, mostly.” She rolls onto her side again, for some reason wanting to look him in the eye. “Sometimes it happens differently, but most of the time it’s the same.”

“If you don’t want to talk—”

“I do,” she interrupts, surprised to find that she isn’t lying. “I  _ think  _ too much, so maybe if I talked it might…help.”

“I’m all ears,” Lance says, spreading his arms and offering her a smile.

“It always starts in the same place, with us infiltrating the satellite monitoring the prison colony. You shoot the sentry at the security terminal, and I pull out wires and shut down their surveillance. But that’s usually where it sometimes diverges.”

“It changes?”

“Yeah.” Pidge inhales bracingly. “Sometimes it’s the same as it happened, with me missing a hidden layer of security and the doors shooting open.” She rubs her face. “Quiznak, everyone insists it wasn’t my fault, but—”

“Pidge, it’s  _ not _ ,” Lance insists, almost harshly.

“I know that now, but what if—”

“There’s no point in asking that. Just…continue, or don’t if you can’t.”

Pidge nods, looking at him again – taking in his eyebrows drawn together in worry, the corner of his mouth ticked down into an obvious frown though he seems to be trying to smile for her benefit. “Sometimes no one interrupts us, but I trip an alarm and the ceiling collapses on us. We get blasted into space, and for some reason you’re not wearing your helmet.

“Or the doors still shoot open, and you’re shot like usual, and there’s so much blood…but the Galra sentries take your body away even though you’re still breathing.

“But the worst—” Pidge chokes on a sob, but still continues, “Quiznak, the worst is when the soldier bursting through the door takes off his helmet after he shoots you…and I see  _ my  _ face.” She sits up, burying her face in her arms and struggling to control her breathing.

“Pidge, look at me.” When she doesn’t, he insists, “Please, Pidge.”

She finally does, meeting his eyes, his gaze trapping her there.

“This is the worst,” he says.

She nods, giggling almost hysterically. “It is.”

“But we can’t…change anything.”

“I know. Quiznak, I  _ know _ .” She sighs, reaching for where his jacket is piled up at the foot of her bed and wrapping it around her body like a blanket.

“Then tell me more about the sweet dreams,” Lance then changes the subject.

Pidge lies down again, heartbeat calming. “Sometimes they’re on Earth,” she says. “Sometimes we’re at that beach you liked—”

“Veradero.”

“Yeah, but I’ve never seen it before so it feels…incomplete.” She glances at him, wanting nothing more than to run her fingers through his hair – the same length as it was the last time she saw him alive. “Sometimes we’re at the Garrison.”

“Oh yeah?” He raises an eyebrow at her, looking amused.

Pidge smiles. “Sometimes they’re memories, sometimes they’re new.”

“What memories?”

“The time you made me laugh so hard I squirted orange juice out of my nose.”

Lance chuckles and says, “I remember that too, but I can’t remember what I said.”

“Me neither.”

“I just remember thinking…wow, he’s cute when he laughs like that.” He averts his eyes, rubbing the back of his neck. “Maybe that’s when my crush on you started.”

“Who knows?” Pidge says, shrugging. “I was in denial for a while.”

“Really?” Lance narrows his eyes at her. “So what made you  _ aware _ ?”

“It wasn’t any one thing,” she explains. “I just…thought about why it bothered me so much that you liked Allura. I mean, I didn’t care that Hunk liked Shay – but it  _ was  _ fun to tease him. For some reason, it was…different with you.”

“So you were jealous.” Lance smirks at her, eyebrows curved suggestively.

“Yes,” Pidge admits huffily, “I was jealous.”

Lance laughs, and then asks, “What other dreams?”

Pidge shrugs and lies, “Not much else.”

“Then why are you blushing?”

She claps her hands onto her cheeks. “I don’t want to talk about it.”

“Come on, Pidge,” Lance whines, leaning closer to her. “You just talked about your  _ nightmares _ , and besides, we’ve seen each other  _ naked _ .”

“Don’t remind me,” she muttered.

“So how awkward could it be?”

Pidge stares at him, holding her breath, until she lets it all out in a huff and quietly admits, “It only happened  _ once _ .”

“What did?”

“A quiznaking… _ wet  _ dream.”

Lance laughs so hard he falls backwards. Pidge sits up and glares down at him, face hot, waiting for him to regain his composure. When he does, he looks up at her, frowning in confusion, and asks, “But wait, wouldn’t I have  _ noticed  _ that?”

Pidge hides her face in her hands and confesses, “It happened… _ before _ .”

“Oh, quiznak, Pidge,” Lance gasps, breathless with laughter. “I love you so much.”

“Because of  _ this _ ?”

“No, not because of this.” Lance crawls back towards where she still sits upright in bed. “You’re just—Pidge, I love you, I adore you, I…” He sighs, quieter now, bowing his head, and adds, “ _ Te quiero _ , Pidge.”

Pidge knows enough Spanish to understand, so she pretends she doesn’t mind the way her tongue trips clumsily over the ‘r’ and replies, “ _ Te quiero _ , Lance.”

* * *

The next morning, Allura announces that they can take a ‘vacation’ to Earth. Pidge doesn’t quite dance for joy, but relief nearly unbalances her.

Lance’s cautious inquiry after the meeting though sobers her immediately.

“Pidge, can you write a letter for me…for my family?”

She sniffs, swallowing bracingly as she cautiously looks at him. “Yeah,” she says. “Of  _ course  _ I can.”

* * *

Allura, Shiro, and Coran take care of the hard part of convincing the Garrison they mean no harm (“We come in peace,” she joked to Hunk from their view of the meeting aboard the Castle), but by then, Pidge is prepared.

She bundles herself into Lance’s jacket, his letter to his family in one pocket, and his letter to her in the other. It’s still tied with a green ribbon, left untouched since she carefully rolled it up the day she transcribed it.

Matt and her father board the Green Lion ahead of her, Matt helping her father up the ramp. He glances over her shoulder at her, raising an expectant eyebrow at him, and Pidge inhales deeply before following, leaving the familiarity of the hangar behind.

Her father is quieter and more somber than she remembers, even though it’s been about a month since they rescued him. It’s a long road to recovery for him, despite his leading his fellow prisoners in mutiny.

Still, his hugs are as firm as ever, and Pidge buries her face in his shoulder before she takes her seat. “Are you ready to go home, Dad?” she asks, looking up at him.

“As ready as I’ll ever be,” he says, flashing a smile at her. He rests a hand on her shoulder, and Matt, for all intents and purposes her copilot, mumbles a countdown.

The Green Lion shoots out of the Castle and towards Earth. The blue circle that is Pidge’s home grows, until she can make out green and brown landmasses and streaks of white and gray. They breach the atmosphere with a shiver of the Lion, but inside her armor they’re protected from any wear and tear from air resistance and the effects of gravity.

Pidge steers the Green Lion straight for her mother’s house; according to the Garrison, Colleen Holt moved back to Chicago upon her daughter’s disappearance, to be closer to her extended family.

The Green Lion touches down in the middle of a cornfield, bare this time of year between autumn harvest and spring planting. Shallow furrows in the ground are filled with scoops of snow, and the air smells crisp and clean this far from the city, and completely different from the stale, ventilated air of the Castle. Pidge leads the way along a farmer’s path towards the main road.

A car waits for them, a familiar figure standing outside.

Pidge grins so widely she thinks her cheeks will be sore. She and Matt each take one of their father’s arms and help him along the uneven path.

Their mother meets them halfway, tears streaming down her face as she engulfs all three of them into a hug. “I didn’t believe it at first,” she says, touching them each on the cheek in turn. She leans down – less than she had to last time Pidge saw her – and kisses Pidge’s forehead, then both of her cheeks, before finally pulling her tightly against her.

Pidge finally cries when she hugs her mother. “I missed you so much, Mom,” she says, voice shaky. “I’m so sorry I left without saying anything.”

“Oh, Katie, sweetheart,” says Colleen. “None of this is your fault. You found them; you kept your promise.”

She hugs them all again, one at a time, even planting a soft, lingering kiss on Sam’s mouth, and Pidge recalls another promise.

“Mom,” she says cautiously, playing with the zipper of Lance’s jacket, “I have to…do something else right now.” At her family’s obvious disappointment, she quickly adds, “I’ll be back! It won’t take long, I promise.”

“All right, Katie,” her mother says.

All three of them hug her again, her parents each kissing her cheek and her brother ruffling her hair. “Hurry home,” says Matt with a slight smile.

Pidge returns it and says, “I’ll be back before you know it.”

* * *

Lance reappears as soon as Pidge sits in her seat in the Green Lion’s cockpit. “I’m sorry, Pidge,” he says.

“I promised you,” she tells him, “and I promised them too. I’ll be back, and it’ll be like I never left.”

“You mean you  _ won’t  _ go back into space?” Lance crouches beside her as the Green Lion launches into the air and Pidge turns her south and east.

Pidge casts her gaze down and admits, “I don’t know. I haven’t decided.”

“What do you want though?”

She looks at him, takes in his apparent concern. “What would you do?” she wonders.

“I don’t know either,” he says, smiling wryly. He lies down on his side, resting his head in his hand. “That’s one good thing about being dead, huh? I don’t have to decide which family to leave behind.”

“Don’t say that,” Pidge snaps.

“Hmm.” He doesn’t look at her, his eyes instead drifting around the cockpit without focusing on anything.

Pidge examines him for another few tics. Today he wears the same clothes he did when they left Earth, including a mirror of the jacket she now wears. But for some reason his edges are more indistinct than usual, the tips of his shoelaces and the hem of his shirt and jeans dissolving into a thin colored mist, like he’s disappearing before her eyes.

_ Decaying _ before her eyes.

“Oh,” Pidge says when she catches sight of the view outside the window. It’s after sunset here, but the Green Lion’s external lights and the moon and the stars reflect off a deep blue ocean. “I…haven’t been stargazing in a while.”

Lance stands up and walks forward so he can join her at the viewscreen. “We can go at the beach, before we see my family?”

“Won’t they be asleep if we put it off?”

Lance shrugs. “My mom stays up late,” he claims, but he frowns worriedly and adds, “Or she used to.”

At his suggestion, Pidge lands the Green Lion at the edge of a short stretch of beach. She can barely make out the dense palm fronds overhead, casting deep shadows across the dark sand, though they whisper in the same gentle breeze that stirs her loose hair. Water crashes against the shore, white foam standing out against the dark waves and black night. Lance follows her out of the Lion, and together they approach the water.

“It’s not cold,” Pidge says, glancing around. “It’s actually…pretty warm.”

Lance snorts. “We’re in the tropics, Pidge,” he says. “It might be winter, but it’s not like it snows here.”

Pidge glances at him, then considers. Without any more thought, she kicks off her shoes, peels off her socks, and rolls the legs of her jeans up to her knees. She walks to the water, her feet sinking into cool, dry sand before she steps on damp, warm sand.

Even the water is warmer than she expects as the waves reach to touch her toes, pulling compact sand out from underneath her feet. Lance stands beside her, his eyes fixed on her face with a small, soft smile on his.

“What?” she asks him.

“You’re…beautiful, Pidge,” he says. “If I had any breath, seeing you like this would take it away.”

Pidge’s face heats up, and she scowls at him. “If you had a body, I would push you into the water.”

Lance laughs. “Yeah, very vengeful, considering that I would  _ love  _ that.”

“Well…” Pidge thinks of a suitable revenge, and says, “Well, quiznak, I want nothing more than to kiss you, but unfortunately you have no lips.” She shoots a glance at him, trying to assess his reaction.

Lance averts his gaze, rubbing the back of his neck. “Hmm, then I would hold you as tightly as I could and tell you that—” He cut himself off, covering his face with one arm. “Never mind, this is getting embarrassing.”

Pidge laughs gleefully. “Not as smooth as you think, are you, Lance?”

But then the mood drops, because they both mean everything they said. Pidge wants to kiss him, and the fact that she never got a chance to breaks her heart.

“Let’s…go to your parents’ house,” she says, turning to walk back up the beach and towards the Green Lion.

“Yeah,” Lance says, “okay.”

Dry sand sticks to the bottom of Pidge’s wet feet and to her barely damp legs. She grumbles at the feeling of the crumbly particles caught between her toes, and when she almost trips over a clump of seaweed, she reflexively reaches for Lance.

He tries to catch her, but she falls anyway, landing on all fours in the sand and scraping her palms against the rough ground.

“Quiznak,” she hisses. She barely feels any pain, but tears still irrationally build in the corners of her eyes.

“Pidge, I’m sorry,” Lance says, kneeling beside her.

“I know,” she says.

“I tried to catch you—”

“I  _ know _ .” She inhales deeply and gets back to her feet, Lance following her. She meets his eyes. “None of this is either of our faults. But it’s…so  _ unfair _ . Why is it that every time I almost forget that-that you’re dead, something happens that makes me remember?” She scrapes sand from her elbows, and then checks the letters in her jacket pockets, making sure they’re still safe and dry.

“I wish I knew,” Lance says quietly.

They now stand before the Green Lion, looking up at her. Pidge considers for a tic, then sits on the sand between her front paws and tells Lance, “I think I need one night alone. Is it all right if your family waits till tomorrow?”

“Sure,” Lance says, settling in beside her. “But…what about me?”

“You can stay,” Pidge says, “but you’re on thin ice.”

“Good thing it’s winter,” Lance quips, but when Pidge doesn’t laugh, he says, “You’ll be okay, Pidge.”

“Everyone keeps saying that,” she says, “and I almost believe it, but when will it be  _ true _ ?”

“Soon,” Lance says, nudging her – or trying to – with his shoulder. “I can feel it.”

“I wish I could feel you.”

“Pidge,” Lance says with a mock gasp, “that sounds almost  _ dirty _ .”

The corner of her mouth quirks up into an involuntary smile, and she says, “Then it’s a good thing I’m covered in sand.”

* * *

The sun wakes Pidge, its rays warming her and the sand, and she puts her hand up to shield her eyes as she opens them. She grumbles, trying to roll over and hide her face, but her back is stiff and the Green Lion nudges her consciousness – and further awake.

“Five more minutes,” she mumbles, smacking her lips together. Her mouth is dry and tastes like salt and sand, but she can’t bring herself to care.

The sounds of the waves - now joined by the calling of seagulls - seems more pronounced in the light of day, but it’s not nearly enough to encourage her to wake up.

“It’s not exactly beach season,” Lance says from above her, “but people  _ will _ be coming around soon. I’ve already spotted a few out for jogs.”

Pidge reluctantly opens her eyes, and after a tic they focus on him. In the sun’s intense rays he’s even less distinct than usual, but she  _ can  _ see him, and his presence reassures her.

Pidge sits up and rubs her face, shaking sand from her messy hair. “I’m not exactly…presentable,” she complains.

“They won’t care,” Lance reassures her. “We don’t even have to take the Green Lion, since the house is within walking distance.”

“But…you’ll disappear.”

“That’s an occupational hazard of being a ghost, I guess.” He smiles, but it falters.

“What if they don’t believe me?” she asks, hugging her knees to her chest. “What if they don’t  _ like  _ me?”

“You don’t have to mention the…ghost thing,” Lance says with a huffy laugh, “but my mom  _ might  _ be superstitious enough to believe it. As for not liking you…” He grins. “Pidge, why wouldn’t they?”

“I’m telling them their son is dead.” She twists a clump of hair – sticky with humidity – around her finger, and sighs.

“Yeah, but if I loved –  _ love  _ you, they will too.”

“Maybe,” Pidge says, though she still doubts it.

They linger until the first people arrive to the beach, everyone from couples walking their dogs to people alone out for a jog. The sun shines warmly, but the air isn’t hot.

As usual, Lance disappears as soon as they have company, and Pidge struggles to her feet. The Green Lion is already camouflaged, her particle barrier activated, so that’s at least one load off her mind.

Pidge follows the directions that Lance gave her before he vanished, into a small town a few blocks from the beach. The buildings – everything from exterior walls to roofs to window shutters – are painted bright colors, and people mill around, chatting with their neighbors and doing their shopping. A few antique cars line the roads, one or two passing and belching acrid exhaust into the air, but there are more bicycles and hoverbikes than automobiles with bellowing combustion engines.

Finally she arrives at a single story house painted pink and yellow – not blue, like she half-expected – and pauses at the end of a stone walkway. She reaches into Lance’s jacket pocket, touching his letter to his parents to make sure it’s still there, and after taking a deep breath she steps onto the path.

Pidge rings the doorbell and steps away from the door to wait, but it isn’t long.

The door swings open, and Pidge looks down to see a girl with pigtails. She starts, “Hi—”

“ _ ¿Quién es?” _

Pidge blinks, glancing over her shoulder as if expecting to see Lance. He said his parents spoke English…

Oh, right, but this must be one of his nieces.

Pidge chews on her lip and says in halting high school Spanish, “ _ ¿Dónde están sus abuelos? _ ”

(She can almost imagine Lance laughing at her accent.)

The girl stares at her for too long, and Pidge wonders if her accent is so bad she didn’t understand her, but then she turns back towards the house’s interior and shouts, “ _ ¡Abuelita! Hay una mujer que no sé! _ ”

Pidge flinches, startled that such a small body could produce such a  _ loud  _ voice…though she  _ is  _ related to Lance. The thought brings a smile to her face, until a short, curvy older woman with hair more gray than black comes into view.

She scolds the little girl too quickly for Pidge to catch – probably something about answering the door for a stranger – before nudging her away and facing her.

Her eyes widen as she takes Pidge in, and she asks in accented English, “Can I…help you?”

Pidge swallows and says, “I…my name is Pidge…I mean, my name is Katie Holt. I’m a friend of your son’s.”

Lance’s mother – and it  _ must  _ be her mother, with dark blue eyes like that – gapes at her, but then she scans her from head to toe with a critical eye and says, “That’s Lance’s jacket.”

Pidge, uncomfortable under the scrutiny, can only nod.

The woman covers her mouth, eyes wide, and demands in a whisper, “ _ When? _ ”

“When  _ what _ —”

“You know what I’m asking you, Miss Holt.”

Pidge inhales, and for a tic too many she almost hates Lance for leaving her this task. She was always  _ awful  _ at comforting people… “We lost track of time in space,” she explains quietly, “but I think it was almost six months ago.”

Quiznak, it had been  _ six months _ since they lost Lance. Sometimes it felt like time dragged on, or else that no time at all had passed, that she would walk into the kitchen to see him joking with Hunk, or into the bridge to find him chatting with Allura, or onto the training deck to witness him challenging Keith to a sparring match…

But no, Lance was gone, the only thing left of him the jacket Pidge wore as a memento, and the specter that haunted her.

Lance’s mother stares at her, and to Pidge’s amazement she smiles. It’s a very  _ pained  _ smile, the lines around her eyes becoming more pronounced, but it’s unmistakable.

(She has the same dimples as Lance, Pidge notices.)

“I’ve been mourning him since the Galaxy Garrison told us he was missing and presumed…dead,” she admits.

“How…how long has that been?” Pidge asks, though she dreads the answer.

“Almost five years.”

Pidge covers her face, trying to contain the shock. She knew it had been long, even estimated it to be as long as that, but hearing it was something else. And she scarcely allowed herself time with her mother, so she hadn’t taken the opportunity to ask. “I’m so sorry, Mrs.—”

“Call me Laura,” interrupts Lance’s mother. She glances over her shoulder into the house and says, “It’s a bit crowded today since my daughter is visiting, but would you like to come in…Katie?”

Pidge doesn’t hesitate to accept her invitation.

* * *

Laura makes Pidge breakfast as soon as she learns that she ate nothing that morning, bidding her to sit at the small kitchen table, even when she offers to help.

Instead, she hands Pidge a mug of slightly stale coffee and a jug of milk.

“We have a cow,” Pidge confides in Lance’s mother as she pours some milk into the coffee. She probably puts too much, but even when still on Earth  _ before _ , she was too young to have acquired the proper taste for coffee, at least according to her parents.

“Hmm?” Laura looks up from a sizzling frying pan of eggs and sausage – the first eggs and sausage that Pidge has seen in  _ five years _ , and the rich scent is heavenly. “A cow?”

Pidge laughs, rubs her face as she rests an elbow on the table. “We went to the mall once and…” She tells Laura the whole story, everything from Coran’s insistence they wear those ridiculous disguises, to Lance diving into a fountain helping her gather enough money for a video game they couldn’t even play once aboard the Castle.

Laura chuckles at all the right places, and by the time Pidge finishes the story, she sets a heaping plate in front of her, taking the seat across the table. “So there are cows in space?” she asks.

“The store we got her from was called  _ Area 51 _ ,” Pidge points out with a giggle. She digs into the food in front of her, suppressing a moan at the first taste of egg. “I…thank you, Laura.” It feels strange to address Lance’s mother by her first name, but not awful.

“But milk was the only real Earth sustenance we had,” she adds.

“What did you eat then?”

“Green goo, usually, but Hunk was a genius with any sort of alien cuisine.”

“Hunk was with you?” Laura asks, leaning against the table.

Pidge nods. “Do you know him too?”

“Yes, he visited one summer, after Lance’s first year of flight school and before they started at the Garrison.”

“I’ll ask him to visit,” Pidge promises.

Laura smiles. “Yes, that would be nice.”

The girl that answered the door then walks into the kitchen, making a beeline for her grandmother. She stops beside her, and Laura pulls her into her lap. The girl stares at Pidge as she speaks directly into her ear.

Pidge stares right back challengingly.

Laura replies to her granddaughter audibly, but the Spanish is too rapid for her to catch anything other than her own name. She strokes the girl’s hair and says to Pidge, “This is Luisa. She’s named after my husband. And she’s…five.”

Pidge tightens her grip on her fork, appetite dwindling where she was ravenous a moment ago. But her plate is almost empty, so she doesn’t feel too bad about telling Laura that she’s full.

“I should go,” she then says. “I still need to visit with my own family.”

“Yes, of course,” Laura says quickly. She pats Luisa’s back, and the little girl darts away, but her eyes, so full of curiosity, linger on Pidge for another tic. She stands up.

Pidge stands with her, and after begging a quick bathroom break, Laura walks her to the door.

“You’re only  _ visiting _ your own family?” she asks.

Pidge shrugs and admits, “My father and my brother are only just come back from space too. A visit, but after that I’m…not sure.”

“Your father and your brother too?” Then Laura’s eyes widen, and she asks, “You said your name is  _ Holt _ ?” At Pidge’s wry smile and nod, she says, “I’m so sorry, Katie.”

“It’s fine,” Pidge tells her quickly. “I found them both, and they’re safe at home now.” She smiles wider, happy about that, at least. “I wish…I could say the same about Lance.”

“Oh, me too,” says Laura. Then, surprising Pidge, she reaches out and hugs her, pulling her tightly against her in an embrace that only a mother can give. “Thank you, Katie.”

“I didn’t…do much,” Pidge says lamely, cautiously returning her hug.

“You gave me news of my son,” she says, sniffing, “and even if it’s not what I would’ve wanted, it’s still…enough.”

Then Pidge remembers the letter, and when Laura lets go of her, she takes it from her pocket and gives the scroll, tied closed with a blue ribbon, to Lance’s mother. “This is from Lance,” she says. “It’s for you, and for your family.”

Laura pinches her eyes shut as she holds the scroll close to her, and she says, “Thank you.” And for a moment it looks as though she will turn back into her house without saying goodbye, but at the last tic she grabs Pidge’s arm and tells her, “Katie, you are also welcome to visit us anytime.”

“I—”

“I know Lance must’ve loved you,” she says, “so please, allow his family the same honor.”

Overcome with emotion, Pidge chokes out, “I was his family too.” But she keeps her composure.

Laura seems to take this for acceptance, for she smiles and briefly rests her hand on Pidge’s shoulder. “I hope I will see you again,” she says. “Next time, you will have to meet my husband.”

“O-okay,” Pidge agrees without thinking about it. She bids Lance’s mother goodbye, and she turns away to head back down the walk, to the street, the front door of Lance’s family home shutting quietly behind her.

Pidge puts the hood of his jacket up as she walks, wanting to hide her face from passersby. She bites her lip to keep the sudden welling of emotions from spilling out, but the lump in her throat still builds as she returns to the Green Lion.

She sneaks aboard without anyone spotting her – or she hopes so anyway – and sits in the pilot’s seat. “Let’s go home, Green,” she says before stealthily launching into the air.

She’s halfway to Chicago when she realizes she hasn’t seen Lance since early that morning at the beach.

“No,” Pidge mutters once the Green Lion touches down on the barren cornfield. She collapses to the floor, curling in on herself. “ _ No _ .”

The first tears slide slowly down her cheeks, leaking out from her pinched eyelids, but it doesn’t take long for the torrent to begin in earnest, and soon Pidge finds herself sobbing harder than she had since Lance died. Her chest aches with fresh grief, because now she knows – with the same certainty that she knows that the universe is vast and that her mother loves her – that Lance is gone, for good.

And it was unfair, she realizes, that she had these last six months with him; he should’ve moved on long ago.

Still trembling, Pidge reaches into the other jacket pocket and pulls out the letter she hasn’t touched since she transcribed and tied it with a green ribbon. She tugs on the ribbon and unfurls the page and reads:

_ Pidge, _

_ Do I have regrets? Sure I do, and I can tell you right now that my biggest one is that I never told you how I feel about you. Even to me, it doesn’t make much sense that I can be the worst flirt in the universe, but still hold back the words that show what you mean to me. Is that weird? You probably think it’s weird, so now you’re judging me for it. _

_ Other than that though? I don’t think I do actually. I went out with a bang, right? I saved the lives of rebels and refugees – and yours too. The universe will remember me as a hero, so of course I have no problem with that. _

_ But you? I hope you remember me as the goofball, the guy you stayed up too late playing video games with, the one you did your best to avoid at the Garrison. Remember the pranks we pulled on Hunk, and on each other, and the times you let me give you a face mask, or I let you cut my hair – another regret, by the way. Remember all the times I saved your life and you saved mine. _

_ And who knows? Maybe there’s a reality somewhere in the multiverse – that’s what it’s called, right? – where we’re both still alive and in love and together. I hope they’re happy, those lucky quiznaks. _

_ But Pidge, don’t be afraid to move on. It’s not healthy grieving for so long, and unlike with your dad and Matt, you won’t be finding me again anytime soon. _

_ I love you. _

_ Lancey Lance _

Pidge wipes tears off her face. The letter is in her handwriting, and utterly devoid of any spelling or grammatical mistakes, but the sentence structure and phrasing is so  _ Lance  _ that the words bring a smile to her face and comfort her.

The Green Lion purrs, warmth flooding their connection, and Pidge pats the floor in acknowledgement. She rereads the letter, actually  _ laughing  _ this time, because he’s right:  it’s time to stop grieving, to move on.

That doesn’t mean she’ll love him any less, or that it won’t still hurt sometimes, but she’ll be more content, and she’ll be able to function like a regular human being – or like a Paladin of Voltron.

Pidge stands up and shrugs out of Lance’s jacket. It had become a crutch for her, a hug from him since he couldn’t give her one himself, and despite rationalizing it as a keepsake – like Matt’s old glasses – the jacket doesn’t belong to her, because it was never given.

“We’ll be back,” she tells Green as they lift off again, flying in the direction they came. “I just have a delivery to make.”

Pidge sprints from the camouflaged and shielded Green Lion to Lance’s parents’ house, pausing at the door and pounding in her frenetic burst of energy. When Laura herself opens the door, surprised and with a question in her eyes, Pidge gives her the bundled jacket.

“It’s old,” she says, with some reluctance, because for six months she’d taken it as  _ hers _ , “but it was Lance’s.”

Laura smiles tremulously and pushes the bundle back towards her. “I know,” she says. “I bought it for him, but…he would want you to keep it.”

“I—”

“Katie, take it,” says Laura.

And Pidge does, but this time she accepts it as a gift from a family member.

**Author's Note:**

> ...at least i didn't kill Sam in this one
> 
> you get 3.14159 points if you spotted my unintentional _Twilight_ reference  
>  also i last took Spanish seven years ago and had to google where the accents went, so feel free to correct me
> 
> and if you made it to the end, go read some fluff; you deserve it!!
> 
> alternatively, come yell at me [on tumblr](https://sp4c3-0ddity.tumblr.com/)
> 
> ~~and now i shut up~~


End file.
